


Adore Me

by SleepySappho



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Adora isn't even in this fic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Music, Angst, Catra/Her Issues - Freeform, F/F, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, One Shot, Oops All Metaphor, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, TOO MUCH METAPHOR, The Catradora is at best implied, This Is Really For Nobody But Me, catra is not okay, content warnings in notes, it's more like Catra/the hole Adora left behind tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:15:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25156102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepySappho/pseuds/SleepySappho
Summary: Catra finds herself performing the one song she never planned on sharing.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 72





	Adore Me

**Author's Note:**

> So I was gonna write you all some lovely self-indulgent smut for my ongoing modern au but instead I had a panic attack, spent all day spiralling, and wrote this Fucking Mess. 
> 
> I realized after writing this that it was probably at least partially inspired by mootbot's excellent fic [a horse named cold air](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24921691/chapters/60311065) by making me think about Catra angst while crying and listening to Mitski today.
> 
> This is pretty heavy shit, so please check these content warnings before reading:
> 
> CONTENT WARNINGS FOR: metaphoric imagery invoking self harm, metaphoric imagery invoking body horror, reference to alcoholism, reference to PTSD and depression, unhealthy coping mechanisms, intense self-loathing, metaphorical discussion of blood, rotting flesh, and severe bodily harm, and just general Bad Vibes

Catra _hurts._

That's all there is to it, really. She could, and has, spent countless hours chasing down her traumas, catching them in her hands and pinning them down in a row like butterflies so she can trot them out to everyone who wants to know her component parts, all neatly labeled, categorized and subcategorized, given their proper scientific names. She talks about it, uses words like "Major Depression", "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder", "Anhedonia". She has an obligation, she supposes, to go out in public with her chest cut open, walking around half-dissected and smiling, happy to point out all the little knots of scar tissue for anyone who asks. Because it could help someone, they tell her, someone out there who feels the same, could mean the world to them that their idol hurts the same way they do.

It sounds like bullshit, but, whatever. It's almost more work _not_ to talk about it now. At some point she became a poster child for having a fucked up brain, or something. Whatever.

It's all just window dressing, she thinks. All the diagnoses and whatever, they help her out a little bit, help her understand why she acts the way she does sometimes, give her access to the cacophony of pills she swallows every morning to keep her somewhat human. But it's all just different ways of saying the same thing, fancy footwork to dance around the unavoidable issue:

Catra _hurts._ All the time. And there's nothing she can do to make herself stop hurting.

She carries that pain around, a viper coiled in the pit of her stomach. It makes her sick, nearly always. Contrary to certain tabloid speculation she would much rather _not_ end half her meals with the taste of vomit staining her mouth, but sometimes the hurt twists inside her, coils and uncoils on itself and there's no space left inside her for anything else. 

She only knows one way to get it out, and she fuckin' _hates_ it.

She's pretty sure she used to love singing. Or like it, at least. She thinks it used to be fun, although that concept is so far away from her now that she doesn't know what that might have felt like. But, she remembers _telling_ herself she liked singing, and back then she wasn't as good at lying to herself so she thinks it's probably true.

That was before she realized she could use her voice to hurt people. Before she realized she could open up her throat and let the viper slither out and sink its fangs into the nearest victim and for just a _moment,_ just an impossibly beautiful second, it would be too busy hurting someone else to hurt her. 

And then she discovered that people _wanted_ that, if she did it right, if she made it rhyme and put it to music and went up on stage and let it pour out of her, if she let the viper uncoil inside her and spit poison with her words, to try and take the hurt inside her and push it _out,_ onto as many people as possible, to make them _feel_ it as bad as she did, even just for a moment, people would _praise_ her for it. Hell, they'd even give her money. It felt wrong, incredibly so, she knew she was hurting them, but it was also the only thing that could bring her moments of actual relief. It wasn't _fun,_ anymore, it didn't make her feel good, but she was reliant on it. She needed it to survive.

Catra's hurting, tonight. Maybe worse than ever. She wants a drink but hasn't had one, not in ten months. Her therapist says she should be proud of that, but she's not really. It's not the addiction she really needs to quit. 

The music isn't helping as much as usual, tonight. It's all old songs, the same pain she's always gone back to, almost too familiar to be cathartic anymore. As much pain as she's dredged up to shove down these poor fuckers' throats, there's always one thing she never touched. A piece of shrapnel that's worked its way in deeper every year and made itself a home in a bleeding knot of muscle and nerves and arteries, tangled up so tightly that any attempt to extract it will cut her to ribbons. She wants it _out,_ wants to pull it out on stage and show everyone the infected tissue, swollen and necrotic and weeping pus, wants to show them that _this_ is what they came for, _this_ is what they paid to see, _this_ is the beating heart of the "artist" they claim to idolize. 

Just a sick, rotting mess. Only getting worse from here.

It would kill her, she knows, but it feels more worth it every time, to finally get it all outside of her even if she she has to drag every blood vessel and nerve ending and ligament in her body along with it, worth it to feel those few brief moments of blessed _nothing_ inside her before she crumples to the floor, dead. 

Her set is supposed to be over now. Some poor asshole in the audience calls for an encore and immediately gets shouted down. The people who come to see her more than once know not to ask for more than they're given with her. 

She should leave.

She's not leaving.

"You know what? Fuck it. Here's some shit you haven't heard before. It's called _Adore Me,_ and you're gonna fucking hate it." She knows they won't, she says that every time she cuts open a new piece of herself to put on display. They always love it, the more fetid, the better. 

They're gonna go nuts for this one.

Anyone who's followed her career will immediately recognize this as an older one. Somewhere along the line she'd fallen in love, or at least lust, with dissonance, hungry to make her music as unpleasant to listen to as it feels to sing. 

This isn't that.

This is soft, and gentle, and sickly-sweet. It's fruit rotten before it falls from the tree, wasps burrowed into the soft flesh, ready to punish the romantic fool who tries to taste it. It's a flower that's only beautiful so it can warn you away. It's kissing someone venomous and bright and smiling, open-mouthed and tongue cut open on her fangs.

It's the little gap she used to have between her front teeth. It's the way she didn't run away when Catra hurt her. It's her giant fucking forehead and her dumb little hair poof that always fell apart when they wrestled in the tall grass behind the school and the sound of her laughter and the promises she didn't keep and the hole she carved into Catra's stomach the day she didn't come back.

It's over, now, and the room is dead silent. Catra can feel the blood still pouring from her mouth, pooling on the stage at her feet and dripping off the edge, onto the waiting crowd. She isn't empty, like she wanted to be, she isn't empty at _all,_ and she isn't dead either. 

In the end, it wasn't any different after all.

Fuck it. She's come this far.

"That one's about a girl named Adora Sheridan. I guess they all are, more or less."

She walks off the stage.

She didn't see the steady red blink of the stage cameras. Didn't think about who outside this room might see or hear her self-vivisection.

In the end, she doesn't know if she would have done it differently, anyway. 

**Author's Note:**

> Well. That certainly is something that I wrote. I promise I'll get back to writing smut and hurt/comfort soon. You can follow me on Twitter @SleepySaph and honestly if you liked this Huge Bummer of a fic you might actually enjoy my deeply depressing twitter presence


End file.
